Aneta Londa: Switching career from marketing to IT

Aneta Londa: Switching Career from marketing to IT

Last week we had the chance to meet Aneta Londa, a truly inspirational and fearless woman who welcomes challenges with open arms. She studied international relations at the University of Economics in Prague, where she later on specialized in Marketing during her masters studies. Then, she decided to start her career in marketing at Sephora. After a while, she knew she needed a change and a new challenge. When the opportunity presented itself, she decided to help run a family ice-cream business. Eventually, when she was ready to come back to work, she googled Czechitas and decided to go for their workshops. Read on to find out more about Czechitas and their work.

How did you find out about Czechitas?

At the end of 2017, I was ready to go back to work after having worked on the family business for around half a year. I thought I would go back to marketing, but one day I was online and googled the Czechitas’ website. Their workshop opportunities immediately caught my eye. I saw that they organized one-day workshops, e.g. on Instagram. As I was managing the ice-cream shop’s Instagram account at that time, I thought it would be best to try and learn something new. The workshop was really amazing and I was hooked. I went back to their website to look for more workshops and that’s how I found the web development workshop. I was a bit worried that it might be too hard, but actually I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun I was having and how well I was doing.

Why did you apply for the Digital Academy with Czechitas?

I saw they offered Digital Academy before I even went to their Instagram and Web Development workshop, but I was too afraid that I wouldn’t be able to manage the course.I was scared that I didn’t have enough knowledge to participate. That’s why I attended the Instagram and web development workshops first. After having Digital Academy at the back of my mind for a while, I decided to go for it. I applied and was selected. Simply put, I wanted to learn more.

How did Digital Academy help you move forward in your career?

Thanks to the Digital Academy by Czechitas, I decided to do another career change and I am currently looking for a job in IT. Obviously, I’m applying for junior roles and I already have two offers - one as a Junior Data Scientist in a start-up and the other as IT analyst in a corporate firm. So I’m really happy about that. Earlier, when I was making the switch from marketing into the family ice-cream business, I was not sure about the move and I took much longer to make that decision. This time, it was different. After completing Digital Academy, I’m much more confident and sure that this is the direction I’d like to go. That’s also probably why I made the decision much faster.

Tell us about how the Digital Academy program works. What was the structure of the program and what did you learn?

Digital Academy is a three-month long program which is completely respectful of the fact that people have their jobs or families. So it’s manageable if you work full-time or even if you’re on maternity leave.

The main objective of the academy is to create your own project; you can either choose your theme with a partner company or think of something on your own - I actually managed to push through a program concerned with ice cream. Me and my colleague worked on a program that is able to plan ice cream flavors (i.e. so our flavors are not repetitive or so we don’t have only flavors which have the same allergens).

The course is very well structured, there are either evening courses (from approximately 6PM until 9PM) and intense courses during weekends (usually on Saturdays). But apart from all this they offer even optional courses, i.e. when you need to help with your project or to repeat some of the lessons that you didn’t totally understand - they make sure you always have someone you can go to. We also had regular courses of Python and SQL throughout the entire course that I really enjoyed.

Obviously, we needed to study a lot on our own as well, but once you get picked to go on the Academy, you actually want to study on your own, because you want to get better and you feel extremely motivated to do well and to see actual results of your hard work.

What’s your experience with Femme Palette so far?

I registered with Femme Palette last week and managed to go to three workshops already, which is really exciting for me.First, I went to the “I am Remarkable” workshop by Google and then I also attended the HTML and CSS workshops organized by a Femme Palette member Midori Kocak last the weekend. The workshops were really great, the HTML and CSS workshops were useful to me as it was a great revision exercise of what I learned at previous CzechITas course. I hope more workshop like these will be organized, because I would definitely like to go.

Aneta is a true testament that if you put your mind to something, you really can achieve it. Besides all that, she is a friendly person, too. If you are thinking of changing career, don't hesitate to reach out to Aneta on our platform and invite her for a coffee. We're sure she would share her inspiring story of transitioning careers with you!